As discussed in my previous post on personal knowledge graphs for personal branding, structured data is key for improving discoverability and establishing authority. An easy way to add more schema to your own knowledge graph is by using Schema.org – a universal vocabulary supported by major search engines like Google. In this post, I’ll explain what Schema.org is, why it matters, and how to implement it on your website or blog.

What is Schema.org?

Schema.org provides a collection of schemas – code markup – that webmasters can use to tag content with semantic information. This includes defining things like:

  • Entity types (Person, Event, Organization etc)
  • Properties of entities (name, date, location etc)
  • Relationships between entities (attendee of, employee of etc)

By adding Schema.org markup to your pages, you enable search bots to better understand your content. Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Yandex rely on schema for powering rich results.

For personal knowledge graphs, Schema.org allows you to semantically tag facts about yourself – your skills, education, experience, and more.

Why Add Schema.org Markup?

Here are some of the key benefits of Schema.org for your personal site:

  • Rich Snippets – Schema enables rich search results like knowledge panels, which improve click-through rates.
  • Improved Rankings – Semantic markup provides clearer signals to search algorithms about relevance.
  • Data Portability – Your structured facts can be easily ported between sites or re-used for other applications like chatbots and virtual assistants.
  • Future-Proofing – As AI evolves, Schema.org will become even more important for machine understanding. Marking up your facts now will prepare your content.

Getting Started with Schema.org

Now let’s get into how to actually implement Schema.org on your own site or blog. Here are the key steps:

  1. Identify Relevant Entity Types – Browse Schema.org to find appropriate classes for your own knowledge graph entities. For personal branding, useful types include Person, Article, BlogPosting, and CreativeWork.
  2. Determine Properties – Each Schema.org type has a defined set of properties to describe attributes. For example, for BlogPosting you can specify headline, articleBody, datePublished, author and more.
  3. Add JSON-LD Markup – The most common format is JSON-LD – basically JSON that follows linked data principles. There are various free tools to generate JSON-LD markup containing your entities and properties.
  4. Place the Markup – Add the JSON-LD markup to the <head> section of webpages where you want entities to appear. For example, mark up your blog posts with BlogPosting schema.
  5. Link Your Entities – Use properties like sameAs to connect your entities to external URLs – like linking your Person profile to Twitter, LinkedIn, and other relevant sites.
  6. Test Your Implementation – Use Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool to validate that your schema is free of errors and being interpreted correctly.
  7. Iteratively Improve – Treat your schema markup as a work-in-progress. Continuously refine it by adding more semantic data points over time.

Here are some examples of Schema.org properties you can use for your personal knowledge graph entities:

  • Person
    • name
    • image
    • jobTitle
    • alumniOf
    • knowsAbout
  • Article/BlogPost
    • headline
    • datePublished
    • author
    • mainEntityOfPage
  • Project
    • name
    • description
    • startDate
    • skillsRequired
  • EducationalOccupationalExperience
    • jobTitle
    • startDate
    • endDate
    • occupation
    • skillsUsed

The key is to start simple – even limited schema is better than none! Avoid marking up irrelevant or misleading data just for the sake of it. Remember quality over quantity.

Over time, you can enrich your markup to accurately reflect details you want search engines to understand about your personal brand. Leveraging Schema.org now will ensure your knowledge graph leverages semantic best practices.

Next Steps

I hope this post provided a good introduction to implementing Schema.org markup on your website or blog to power your personal knowledge graph! Let me know in the comments if you have any other questions. In my next posts, I’ll be sharing more tips on structuring different aspects of your graph using Schema.org vocabularies.